vB Easy Archive - Dismal Battery life: Tilt

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From the beginning, my #1 archnemesis of pocket PCs is the battery life. I came from a Blackberry environment where I could use the phone for 3-4 days straight, getting pushed email, making calls, surfing the web without charging it once. It was nirvana. Imagine my shock and disappointment when I "upgraded" to the 8525 and discovered that not only could I not get 3-4 days without a charge, I couldn't get ONE day without a charge. I would leave for work at 8am, and by 5pm I was getting battery warnings. By 7pm it would be dead, even if I never used the phone. It was so bad I swore off PocketPCs forever and promised to go back to a Blackberry ASAP.

So I waited, hoping a 3G blackberry would be released that allowed me to edit Office documents and tether. Needless to say, it's still yet to happen. So I ended up doing something I never thought I would do - I upgraded to the Tilt. I couldn't resist the good price or the hype. But I was terrified because from all reports, the battery power was WORSE than the 8525. How can it be WORSE than a phone where, if I turned on WiFi, 3G, bluetooth, played music and surfed the web at the same time would die two and a half hours after a full charge?

Luckily it wasn't quite that bad - but it was pretty bad, still unable to make it past 7pm without needing life support.

Until...

I used this forum, xda, modoco (sp) and several other forums and downloaded some really great applications. Among them are KaiserTweak and Bandswitch. There were also a couple of other registry tweaks that really came in handy for saving battery life. I configured KaiserTweak to auto-disconnect any idle data connection after a minute, and configured Bandswitch to auto-timeout 3G after 5 minutes and switch to Edge. The registry tweaks also handled any outstanding memory leaks that lead to performance/battery problems.

In the end, my battery life improved DRAMATICALLY. Observe:

Before:
disconnect phone from charger at 8am.
Listen to one hour of music on train ride
total of 20 minutes of phone calls until 5pm
company email every 15 minutes
personal email every 30 minutes

By 5pm it was at 20% battery power. At that point I usually stop using the phone entirely. By 8pm, it powers off.

After:

Disconnect phone from charger at 8am
Listen to one hour of music on train ride
total of 20 minutes of phone calls until 5pm
company email every 15 minutes
personal email every 30 minutes
by 5pm - 93% battery power!!!

I went on - got a haircut, took the phone and listened to music during the wait - an hour and a half wait.
Came back, listened to music on the train ride to see my girlfriend (1.5 hours)
Played with HTC interface and downloaded some more interfaces (using EDGE)
Went to dinner at 10:30pm with girlfriend. Still receiving email and even checked for sports scores during a little break
Came back to her place after midnight and forgot to recharge the phone (distracted for some reason)
Woke up at 10am, looked at the phone:

You ready for this?

78%!!!!

It's 11am right now and it's still at 78%. At this rate, I can likely go a second day without a charge while still using the phone casually for all of my purposes. It's been so effective that I'm going to switch to Blackberry-style push email and enable some features I always kept off - such as Bluetooth.

I think we can effectively declare the battery problems with the TILT over.

If anyone has any questions about how this was done, just drop me a line.

Thanks!

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OK guys, I'm back.

To answer your questions:

"What were the other registry tweaks that you found for the memory leaks?"

On the XDA-developers website there are a few registry files floating around in zip format. I'm at the airport right now, so I can't dig around for very long, but if you go to the Tilt threads you'll see them pretty quickly.

"One other question, If you disconnect 3G/Edge after a short period, does that affect your push e-mail any?"

No, I received my email as scheduled. It doesn't disconnect the connection entirely, it just turns off 3G and switches to EDGE. When it's time to check email, it'll re-open a data connection to EDGE, download email and at the timeout will disconnect from EDGE.

Keep in mind that there's a difference between "disconnecting" and "disabling". Bandswitch covers disabling 3G entirely, so that all traffic I generate goes through EDGE. The KaiserTweak covers disconnecting any open or persistent connection so that when there's no traffic, there's no battery draining connection. Of course, technically KaiserTweak also has an option to disconnect an idle connection too. But I use all the options on KaiserTweak anyway.

"this is great to hear, but some of this is just conditioning of the battery. How long have u had the phone?"

I've had it for a couple of weeks, and while I agree that there's an element of conditioning, as a former owner of the 8525, I know what conditioning gives me, and this is FAR beyond that. With the 8525, my battery life extended by about an hour post-conditioning. I've had this phone unplugged all weekend. Trust me when I tell you that conditioning is not THIS good. In fact, my conditioning cycles probably aren't even complete yet, since I've only really started using this phone actively for about a week. That means my battery life is going to get even BETTER after this.

"Interesting. First on listening to music, I gather from your statement about never using Bluetooth that you are using wired headphones. Where'd you get the headphones? "

I'm using a pair of really high end Shure headphones. I think they're E5s or somesuch. A couple hundred bucks. But I'm pairing them with a headphone to mini-USB adapter that includes a mic. If you're interested, I can send you the link to where I bought it (don't want to seem like an ad, though). I bought it for around $20, and it works great. When using it with WMP, I get near iPod quality sound. When using it with TCPMP I possibly get better-than-iPod quality sound because of the finer control of the EQ.

"On email settings. Sounds like you have setup polling for your personal email, are you using Xpress Mail for your company mail?"

Yeah, I'm polling every 30 minutes for personal mail (though now I'm going to change it to 5 minutes because, heck, why not?) and I'm using ActiveSync for company mail, checking every 30 minutes, I think. But I'm now going to change that to "as it arrives" because the battery response is so good now.

"Obviously both are able to initiate the data connection even after the Kaiser Tweak data connection timeouts - Sweet! I'm having trouble understanding where bandswitch comes in. The mail applications won't pull down that much data, so the 5 minute timeout won't come in to play, and the Kaiser Tweak data timeout kills the connection after idle for a minute. Where does bandswitch help save battery power by dropping to Edge, when surfing the web?"

I find that EDGE suits all of my needs for all but message boards, tethering, using Opera, or streaming stuff (Sirius, youtube, etc.). So I keep it on EDGE at all times now, and switch to 3G when I need it. Bandswitch auto-switches back to EDGE after five minutes, so I'm always in good shape. Frankly, you could probably get away with using one of the third party comm managers to similar effect with no real difference, but the key is being able to switch on demand.

Here are some links to Bandswitch and KaiserTweak:

Bandswitch: http://commmgrpro.com/_wsn/page2.html
KaiserTweak: http://www.jongma.org/KaiserTweak/

BTW - It's now 3:54pm on Sunday. It's been the entire weekend without a charge. Spent about 30 minutes talking over the weekend, constant receipt of personal email, and a little bit of sports scores checking and some news. A number of text messages.

42%!!!

I am astonished by this. It's ALMOST Blackberry territory.

Really, I don't even need it to go on for that long - all I really wanted was an all nighter without a charge so I could go from work to Happy Hour to the club and still be able to call a taxi at the end of the night. I couldn't before - now I can. I'm totally happy.